Caltrain Station Blues

Next week, beginning on Valentine’s Day, the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board will hold four meetings-- one each in San Jose (Feb. 14 at 7 p.m.), San Francisco (Feb. 16, 6 p.m.), San Carlos (Feb. 17, 6 p.m.) and Gilroy (also Feb. 17, 6 p.m). The purpose of these meetings is to determine which of ten Peninsula and Santa Clara County Caltrain stations will close for weekday service.

Queued up to the chopping block are stations in Bayshore, South San Francisco, San Bruno, Hayward Park, Belmont, San Antonio, Lawrence, Santa Clara, College Park and yes, Burlingame. These are the stations with the lowest ridership on Caltrain’s 32-station line.

Depending on the outcome of next week’s meetings, up to seven of these stations could lose weekday service. Also under consideration: suspension of all service south of San Jose’s Diridon station, elimination of special event trains, cuts to all weekend service and, naturally, a 25 cent fare increase.

Like so many services (and individuals), Caltrain is in a world of hurt following two-plus years of recession. It depends on contributions from SamTrans, the San Francisco MTA and Santa Clara VTA for operating costs. Each of those agencies is feeling the pinch, and bad news rolls downhill; hence, Caltrain has been in a perpetual state of emergency for years.

Only three years past its most recent renovation, the Burlingame Caltrain station is a city landmark, initially built out of necessity for the wealthy Burlingame Country Club set who needed easy access to San Francisco. It was the first Mission Revival-style permanent building in San Mateo County, designed by George Howard and Joachim B. Mathisen. The station opened on Oct. 10, 1894. In 1971, it became California Registered Historic Landmark No. 846. National recognition soon followed.

Like many Peninsula towns, the nascent Burlingame wouldn’t have found traction if not for its transportation conduit to The City. Generations ago, excited locals lined up at the train station to greet President Theodore Roosevelt, who came to visit the country club on May 12, 1903. Forty years later, residents recalled, trains full of U.S. soldiers, on their way to San Francisco, passed through town. The train station was designed to be the center of Burlingame life.

And now they want to shut it down?

Caltrain is in a difficult spot. They have a $30 million problem, and no matter what decisions they make in response, someone is going to object. The problem is with the source of funding. Caltrain is in trouble because its sources of funding, all county public transportation systems, are in trouble.

This is a real wrench in the gears of the transit-oriented development plans almost every city in San Mateo County has been working on for the past two decades. Last October, Burlingame received a $1.1 million grant from the Department of Transportation for the , which, combined with elements of , would place mixed-use development along Howard Avenue and Myrtle Road, adjacent to the Caltrain station. What do you call transit-oriented development when there’s no transit? Transit-disoriented development?

The result is inevitable: more cars. Average weekly Caltrain ridership was down to 36,778 riders in 2010 from 2009’s 39,122 riders. However, that figure is still higher than weekly ridership for any other year, save for 2008’s sliver of an advantage (36,993), dating back to 1997.

Burlingame’s ridership is among Caltrain’s lowest, somewhere around 1,000 people weekly. Lets do the math: assuming that, as clean-living Bay Area citizens, those riders would seek carpools (in Priuses), and assuming that they work no further away than San Francisco, we’re looking at around 15,000 vehicle miles traveled per week-- a little less than 800,000 miles over a 12-month period. Figuring the Prius gets 46 miles per gallon, that works out to 17,391 extra gallons of gas burned because Caltrain closed the Burlingame station. Multiply that by seven closed stations and you’ve got about 120,000 gallons of gas.

It’s difficult to determine how this would impact property values in Burlingame, except to say that as we’ve moved deeper in the 21st century, “close to public transportation” may not add as much to a home’s value as “award-winning schools,” but it’s definitely equal to “near parks” and “close to shopping and dining.” Trains may seem quaint to those who don’t use them, but the loss of Burlingame’s Caltrain stop would be anything but trivial.